Chapters - Unknown 9
Chapters was a 6-month long ARG, created by Alice & Smith, promoting Reflector’s upcoming game: Unknown 9.
A secretive, century-old, group called the Leap Year Society has decided to come out of the shadows in order to hopefully recruit more members to their fragmented organisation.
As a new Quaestor, you’re tasked with helping solve mysterious occurrences around the world with the help of your trusted community manager, Victoria.
During this project, I was charged with designing puzzles and interesting scenarios that would fit with the intellectual property’s themes. I then designed the narrative flow using the chatbot technology: Google DialogFlow. This acted as our community manager in order to provide hints to the players.
All of the missions were fed in our database using JSON scripts, which could be changed on the fly if issues were found during gameplay.
I learned a lot about time management during this project, because we had to provide a new mission every week, without fault, for the duration of the ARG. While some missions were created before the start of the event, most of them were conceptualised, integrated and tested during a 7-day period.
Unfortunately, the ARG ended in February 2021 and is no longer playable, but you can find screenshots below and playthroughs online.
One of the questions used in the Leap Year Society Assessment Test. We had to write 12 questions that had an uncanny element to it. Seemingly innocuous questions with slightly weird answer possibilities. Every answer would increase or decrease a hidden stat, which would then put you in a specific role, determining which branch of the society you'd end up in.
Players were put in separate departments depending on the answers they've given during the test. This would change some of the missions they would receive during gameplay. I was in charge of coming up with 3 departments and 5 roles, or classes, that each had their own specific strengths. I wanted these classes to feel modern and all have something related to the psyche. One would have great analytical skills, basically an encyclopedia on legs, while another would be able to command a room because they were able to easily read the emotions of others. On Discord, players proudly displayed their roles and would show it off while they were collaborating on puzzle solving.
Players would choose their next mission on the interactive world map once they were put in their respective department. The world map also showed player density, displayed as orange dots, based on their location. We wanted to diversify the placements of each mission as much as possible, mainly to make them feel fresh, but it had the benefit of preventing button overlap too!
An example of a case file. Players had clues to click on and would then ask Victoria (bottom right) pertinent questions or answers to the riddle in order to advance. We used Google DialogFlow as our vessel for Victoria, controlling the flow of information using JSON files and context codes as well as Google's powerful machine learning AI.
An example of a clue asset. Once a mission was over, players could open their databank and review all the given assets as well as any discoveries they've made. Since missions could not be replayed once completed, I thought this would make a good memento for players to look back on, while also providing a closing statement on each mission.
An example of a puzzle asset given during a mission. This email was genuine and players had to contact Jacob outside of the game to solve this puzzle. Most of the replies were automatically generated using specific keywords, but sometimes we'd sneak in more personalised messages.